by Caryn Lix
On the floor between us lay the smoking pile of fleshy chunks that used to be the aliens. There was no blood, only the strange fluid we’d seen them use on their own ship, but my stomach still lurched at the sight. I forced myself to look at the hunters instead. “What’s going on?” I managed.
“We hoped you’d tell us,” Hallam drawled.
I risked a few steps toward them. “Omnistellar lured those monsters here to steal their tech, as you probably know by now. They thought they’d reinforced this ship enough to keep the creatures out, but they were wrong. Maybe they made a mistake, or maybe these aliens are stronger than the ones on Sanctuary. Either way, they’re here.” I swallowed hard. “Have you seen the command center?”
“Yeah,” said Priya softly. The muscles in her neck clenched. “Yeah, we saw it.”
“Then you have to know we’re on the same side now.” Déjà vu swirled around my head. A few weeks ago, I’d made this same speech to Cage, and later to Rita. “These things don’t care who’s Omnistellar and who’s not. They might care who’s an anomaly, but only because they want to soak you in slime and turn you into one of them.” I risked a glance at the floor. My boot was inches away from a curved talon, at least a foot in length, protruding from a gory arm. “And that’s if you’re lucky—and you count turning into one of these things lucky. But I get the sense these ones aren’t here to harvest. They’re here to kill.”
Priya hesitated. She glanced over her shoulder, but I couldn’t see or hear what the others said to her. “Come on out,” she said at last. “We’ll talk about it.”
Well, that was something, at least. If she wanted to arrest me, she wouldn’t beat around the bush. She didn’t have to. I stepped gingerly around the mess on the floor and made myself walk with measured, normal steps rather than breaking into a run. Still, I couldn’t help a sigh of relief as I exited the med facility, even if I was now surrounded by cybernetic anomalies sent to hunt me down.
I glanced at Matt, but he didn’t meet my eyes. Instead he stared at the floor, an expression of barely suppressed horror on his face. I resisted the urge to reach for him. Did he wake to the same nightmares I did, to visions of the creatures tearing through his flesh?
I had new nightmares to replace those now. So that was fun.
Finn, as usual, remained silent, leaning against the wall and watching me with a carefully calculating expression. I looked from one to another. “Is anyone else alive on this ship?”
“We don’t know,” Priya replied. “We were in the holding cells with your friends when we felt the attack. We headed to the command center to see what was going on and found it the same way you did.”
“Wait.” I bit my lip, not wanting to ask, not wanting to know. “The command center. Do you mean the one on the first level or the second?”
“Down here. We were about to head upstairs when the power went out. We doubled back to security for lights. We haven’t seen or heard anyone else.”
I nodded, swallowing hard. “Don’t bother checking level one. Everyone in the command center is dead. My dad was alive, though. I left him in an office.”
“Cord is alive?” Hallam asked sharply.
How did they know my . . . of course. They worked for Omnistellar. I closed my eyes, exhausted. “Yeah. We were talking during the attack. He hit his head, and I couldn’t wake him up, so I went looking for help. Do you think . . . ?” I trailed off. It was their job to capture and imprison me. They were probably about to laugh in my face. My pride warred with the image of my father lying in a pool of his own blood until I whispered, “Do you think we could go get him?”
Priya and Hallam exchanged speaking looks. “I think we’re all on the same team,” Priya said at last. “For now.”
A burst of hope surged in my heart, so strong it almost hurt. “Then can you let the others go? The more of us, the better our chances. And . . . Reed can help Dad. Unless one of you is secretly a doctor, he might be the only one who can.”
She hesitated a moment, then turned. “Matt? You know them best. What do you think?”
My eyes locked with his, and suddenly he was once again the boy I’d known: tired, frightened, a little lost, but kind when it mattered. Then the hunter flickered back into place. “Keep your eye on Cage,” he said at last. “But . . . yeah. These things, they . . .” He swallowed hard. “We need all the help we can get.”
Priya nodded, accepting that. “All right. Then let’s—”
She never finished her sentence. As she turned toward the opposite end of the hall, a shriek pierced the corridor. Priya jerked her rifle up, but she was a fraction of a second too slow. The alien collided with her and tore her to the floor in a jumble of limbs and screams.
THIRTY-NINE
“PRIYA!” HALLAM SHOUTED, RAISING HIS massive gun.
“No!” Finn bellowed. “You’ll hit her!” He raised his own laser rifle and squeezed off a shot. It caught the alien in the shoulder, and the alien lurched aside with a screech.
Another scream answered nearby. More of them approached. I shrank against the wall. Without a weapon, I was worse than useless. Maybe with one too. I glanced at Matt out of the corner of my eye. Even now I didn’t think I could pull the trigger with him in my path.
Priya groaned and staggered to her feet. She swung her rifle against her shoulder and took a shot at the alien, but it vanished around the corner. “Quick,” she managed. Matt moved to help her, but she brushed him off, swaying a bit as she steadied herself against the wall. “Into the holding cells! The door might slow them down.”
That I could help with. The cells wouldn’t block the aliens long, but anything beat standing here while they tore us to shreds. I lunged for the panel behind us and swiped Dad’s omnicard. The door slid aside with agonizing slowness. Behind me, someone fired another shot, and Priya shouted commands. “Come on!” I yelled, shouldering through the gap as soon as there was enough room.
I pivoted in time to see an alien lunge at Matt. He jerked his gun up—too slow, anyone could see it was too slow—and before my horrified eyes, the alien’s claws extended, going from three-inch curls into foot-long spears aimed straight at his heart.
At the last second, Finn tackled Matt around the waist, bearing both of them to the floor right below the monster’s attack. Finn angled the rifle against the creature and fired twice. The alien screamed, staggered, but didn’t go down. It lunged again. Finn and Matt rolled aside, and its claws stabbed the floor.
“Come on!” I screamed.
“Go!” Priya ordered. She fired two blasts at the alien. It collapsed on the floor, but it kept moving. I reeled. Hadn’t laser blasts killed the aliens before? Were they somehow evolving? A shiver raced down my spine as I remembered Mia’s theory on Sanctuary: that the aliens absorbed our powers somehow, maybe even developing the ability to use her invisibility. What if they adapted to the laser blasts? How long until they became invulnerable?
The hunters responded to Priya’s command without hesitation. Matt dove through the door, Priya on his heels, and Hallam stationed himself to my right with his massive gun braced. “Come on, Finn! Move your ass!”
Finn withdrew, his gun trained on the struggling alien. Suddenly it reared up. Finn and Hallam both squeezed off a shot, but it leaped over both of them, once more grazing the ceiling, driving itself at Finn. I screamed as claws ripped through his back. Finn slumped, his eyes open and startled as his head rolled, staring at me with desperate incomprehension. His lips moved, and blood bubbled from his mouth.
The alien met my eyes with its unseeing glare and unleashed a short, shrill scream. I didn’t need my power to hear its triumph.
Hallam retreated, shoving me along with him, and the door slid shut in front of us. After a second of silence, I lunged forward to stab at the lock. I didn’t know if it would do any good, if the creatures used doors or unlocked them or what. But I had to do something.
Matt wore a shocked, shattered expression, like someone who’d come
through a war zone. Priya, as always, was calm and professional. Only the slight tremor in her hands betrayed her.
“We’re down to three,” Hallam snapped behind me. “Do we call this contract officially botched or what?”
“That’s one word for it.” Priya passed her hand over her face. “So, Kenzie. Where the hell are your friends?”
It took a moment to process her question, but once I’d grasped the meaning, terror sent my heart into overdrive. Four holding cells filled the room, two on either side. And they were all empty. “They were here?” I managed. “I mean . . . ?”
“Yeah. This is where we left them thirty minutes ago.”
A slight smile touched Matt’s face. “I told you not to leave them on their own.” An undercurrent of something almost like pride ran through his voice.
Our eyes met, and he quickly looked away, his hands trembling around his weapon. “I thought you hated guns,” I said softly. Back on Sanctuary, Matt had been reluctant to even take a stun gun. Cage had mentioned something about a school shooting in his past.
Matt scowled. “They fried that section of my brain. Right, Priya?”
She arched an eyebrow. “Eliminating past trauma was part of the mental conditioning, yes. You think you would have been useful to me quivering in fear?”
Blood rushed to his cheeks, and he glanced away. “Sorry,” he muttered.
She nodded. “We’re all on edge. Get yourself together.”
I blinked. Mental conditioning? Omnistellar had only had Matt for three weeks. They must have dumped him on one of Legion’s superfast ships, blasted him into space, and set every medical nanobot they owned to work on his mental and physical refinement. How much had they changed his mind? Was he still himself? Sometimes he seemed to hate me and sometimes he didn’t. As for me, my emotions tangled in a knot of confusion: guilt over shooting him, anger over his betrayal, fear over his new cybernetic implants and what they might have done to his psyche. I took refuge in the fact that Legion seemed pretty stable, more so maybe than most of Omnistellar. I still wasn’t sure if they’d turn on me the second we escaped the aliens, but at this point I was willing to take that chance.
Hallam slapped his palm against the wall. “Finn’s dead, right?”
Priya nodded. “You saw what happened. No way he survived that.”
“How many of those things are in the hallway?” I demanded. An edge of hysteria tinged my voice, and I forced myself to close my eyes, count to five, bobbing my head along with the count. Slightly more controlled, I turned to Matt. “These aren’t the same creatures we saw on Sanctuary.”
Anger and fear warred in his expression when he looked at me, but the fear won out. “No,” he muttered, staring somewhere over my shoulder. “They’re . . . bigger. Longer claws. Faster, I think. And they were already plenty fast.”
“Great.” Priya frowned at the ceiling. “How do we get out of here?”
“We have to find my friends. And my dad.” I pictured him lying on the office floor and my heart skipped a beat. If the aliens discovered him, he’d be completely helpless. Everyone else on the ship was clearly dead. It was only dumb luck that saw him with me at the moment the creatures breached Omnistellar’s supposedly impenetrable security. Sudden rage surged in my chest. I glared at each of them in turn, my gaze lingering on Matt. “You went along with this? You, of all people, knowing what they were, what Omnistellar might unleash—”
Matt jerked forward so quickly I instinctively recoiled. “They said they had it under control!” he shouted. “This ship was supposed to be impenetrable! You were all supposed to be safe!”
“Safe? You planned to arrest us!”
“Yeah, so you wouldn’t be devoured by aliens. I figured it was the lesser of two evils.”
“Oh, so all of this is what, your misguided attempt to protect us?”
Matt sneered. “Don’t get confused, Kenzie. After you killed me and abandoned me on Sanctuary, I didn’t have many choices left. I joined forces with Omnistellar and the Legion to protect myself.” He raised an arm, the light glinting off the metal of his cybernetic implants. “It was this or a prison mining camp, or worse. I don’t have any illusions about honorable motives. But yeah. In a way, I was looking out for everyone. I figured Legion was coming after you whether I cooperated or not. At least this way, you’d be off the station when the aliens showed up.”
“That’s enough,” Priya interjected sharply, stepping between us. The wall of tension we’d built shattered in her wake, rebounding against us. “What the hell is wrong with you? Do you want every alien on this station converging on this room?”
Scowling at them, I approached a nearby security monitor and swiped Dad’s omnicard.
“What are you doing?” Hallam demanded.
“Looking for my friends,” I returned shortly. Sure enough, a quick search of the code brought up the security feeds. Familiarity and something almost like peace washed over me as I scanned through the system. This was so close to what I’d done on Sanctuary. I didn’t miss the naïveté or the ignorance of my old life, but sometimes I missed its complacency, its single-minded rightness. Playing with the visual code, finding the security feeds, brought all of those memories rushing back—and with them, a powerful longing for my parents.
Even if we couldn’t find Reed, we had to get Dad out of that office. I didn’t know how we were going to move him if he remained unconscious, or if it was safe to do so. But it had to be safer than leaving him there.
“Here,” I said, pulling up the display and jerking it loose of its console so the image hovered in the air between us. Cage, Alexei, and Imani shared a cell. Cage and Alexei were cuffed. Imani wasn’t. In the neighboring cell, Reed was similarly uncuffed, but Mia, Jasper, and Rune were bound.
“We ran out of inhibitor needles.” Priya answered my unspoken question as she came to stand behind me. “We didn’t anticipate having to cuff and recuff you people so many damn times. We had to prioritize the most dangerous powers.”
I got that. I would have left the healers free too. But as we stared at the video feed, Imani passed her hands over Alexei’s hands, and his cuffs fell away.
“How . . . ?” Hallam snarled.
I reversed the feed without being asked and slowed it down, but it didn’t give me any further answers. As near as I could tell from the video, she just . . . slid them off. “Did you leave them loose?” I asked, knowing the answer.
Hallam snorted. “They’re self-adjusting.”
As we watched, Imani crossed to Cage. They spoke in hushed tones for a moment, and then she touched his arms, and his cuffs fell away too.
“It’s her upgraded power,” I realized. The others stared at me, and I hurried to explain. “We think contact with the aliens did something to our abilities. To Matt’s, too. That’s probably how you survived after I . . .” I couldn’t say shot you.
But he was already nodding. “The doctors theorized I wasn’t really dead, only badly injured.”
“You were dead,” I replied sharply. “Believe me, we checked. We would never, never, have left you if you weren’t.”
He stared at me for a long moment. “But that means . . .”
“Liam said it was something about the aliens. He called them the source of the powers. Being around them seems to extend our abilities. Sometimes it’s easy to see how our new ability relates to the old one. Reed healed others, and now he can heal himself. Rune can connect with computers without being in physical contact with them. Other times, the connection is less obvious.” I swallowed. These people could still turn on me, and I was giving away too much. I pressed on, hoping they wouldn’t notice I was suddenly short on examples. “In Matt’s case, he went from sensing life to creating it.”
“That’s impossible.” He looked to Priya, shaking his head frantically.
“I don’t know.” She leaned against the wall, inspecting him, her hand stroking her chin. “I always thought you woke up too . . . too healthy for someone
who’d been injured to the point of death.”
“But that means . . .” Matt’s gaze flickered between us.
“It means what we’ve been telling you.” Anger surged in my voice, and I quickly reined it in. I couldn’t blame Matt for assuming the worst. I would have done the same in his situation. “Your new abilities are more than a healing factor. You were dead, Matt. There was absolutely no doubt. Even if you don’t trust me, do you really think Cage would have abandoned you like that?” Cage might not always make the best choices, but he was doing what he had to do to keep the people he cared about alive. Just like I’d been doing when I pulled that trigger. Resolve shot through my spine, and I met Matt’s eyes straight-on. “I was trying to save your life. I screwed up. I shot you. And that has haunted me every second of every day since.”
“Yeah, haunted you so much that you—”
“That I lied about it. Yeah. I’ve apologized for that to everyone else. I’ll say it once more to you: I’m sorry. But I’m not sorry I took that shot.” As the words tumbled from my mouth, their truth echoed through me, and I almost wept in relief. I finally got what Cage meant when he talked about the choices he’d made. We all did what we could to survive, the best we could in the moment. “Should I have stood by while that thing ripped you to shreds? It was the only choice I had.”
He continued to stare at me, but I no longer read fury in his expression. He didn’t exactly look ready to embrace me with open arms, but I’d take confusion over blind hatred any day.
Hallam cleared his throat. “Matt’s abilities are expanding. Fantastic. Are the two of you done with your cathartic moment here, or should I open the door and invite the aliens in to observe?”
He was right. But I didn’t regret the moment either. I was done with regrets, done with apologies.
I returned my attention to the screen and reversed it, since it had continued to play while Matt and I argued. I didn’t know how Imani’s powers suddenly included the ability to release cuffs, but that was obviously what she’d done.
